Thursday, January 20, 2011

Learning to trade

At a recent ThinkorSwim chat, the comment was made that a trader has to do live trades, to really learn how to trade. The New York Times has an article about test-taking vs. study and retention (free registration may be required link). The study concludes that students that are immediately tested on material remember it better than those that either just study or study and take notes.

As always, what works well for one person may not work so well for another, so there may be some folks that do better using the other methods. I tend to focus on the average experience, what the average person can expect, not the top 5% or top 1%, so for the average person it is likely that trading real money (taking the test) is going to be the better path to learning.

There are a lot more caveats to my analogy, but I thought it interesting to draw the comparison.

As for the markets, GLD, GDX, TLT fell out of bed today. GDX and TLT are at short term support. We'll see if support can hold. With time, delta and gamma moving, I am now net neutral on SPY. None of my short January options that expire tomorrow are in serious danger of coming into play.

Long GDX, GLD, TBT
Neutral SPY

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